MacBooks to get NVIDIA GPUs come October 14th?

The latest rumor to belch up from the Internet's bloated lower intestine: Apple may be upgrading their low-end MacBook line to include Nvidia GPUs, come October 14th.

According to The Uranus Apple Weblog:

TUAW is hearing from various sources that new MacBooks are right around the corner, and that they might even have some extra Nvidia power in them. A source tells us that Nvidia is showing off new MacBooks to their employees, and word is going around that the new versions will be released as soon as October 14th.

The addition of reasonably powered GPUs in Apple's low-end laptops could imply a greater commitment to gaming by Apple, but we've heard that noise before. It'll be curious to see, though, whether this means that an updated Mini (long past due) will get an Nvidia GPU as well.

Rumor: Nvidia powered MacBooks on October 14th [TUAW]

[#1 posted by Joel Johnson , October 6, 2008 8:51 AM]

Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) is supposed to be able to use dedicated GPUs for processing assistance, as well.

There's no reason they couldn't take advantage GPU processing with the crappy onboard Intel hardware, but a more powerful GPU certainly would be welcome.

The new OS will also raise the memory limit to 16 TB and support Open Computing Language (OpenCL), a C-based programming language that lets “any application tap into the vast gigaflops of GPU computing power previously available only to graphics applications”.

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/37868/140/

[#2 posted by Marley9 , October 6, 2008 9:05 AM]

Just an unsolicited observation(also known as 'Comments') but Prior to the post last week about the abundancy(or lack thereof) of GrannySmith posts, I never noticed the frequency.

Now however...

[#3 posted by sisyphus , October 6, 2008 9:40 AM]

Just an off-hand remark, but after the now-infamous post last week, the plenitude of unnecessary whinging about too many Apple posts continues unabated.

[#4 posted by aldenhg , October 6, 2008 10:41 AM]

I just hope that nVidia has solved their cooling issues. I'm still waiting for a replacement for a laptop that had an 8400M GS.

[#5 posted by Halloween Jack , October 6, 2008 1:53 PM]

Ordinarily, I'd be sad about the prospect of a new, shinier Mac mini coming out so soon after I got one, but given nVidia's recent problems, maybe not so much.

[#6 posted by Anonymous , October 6, 2008 7:31 PM]

Well this is great news! Looks like Nvidia found a way to unload all those bad laptop GPUs. Njoy mac users.

[#7 posted by dimmer , October 6, 2008 8:51 PM]

"A source tells us that Nvidia is showing off new MacBooks to their employees,"

At that point I start to doubt: Apple doesn't "show off" new hardware products inside of the company, so the suggestion that they'd let nVidia do such is dubious at best.

[#8 posted by Dewi Morgan , October 7, 2008 11:55 AM]

That's pretty cool. Despite many grumbles about their recent actions from the stereoscopic industry, nVidia's cards remain the only mainstream ones that come with 3D drivers.

I'm wondering if this is why the shift.

Will they start making Macs with holographic-seeming 3D screens, like the Sharp AL3DU laptop? That would be awesomecool! Might give the Stereoscopy community the boost it's been needing to go mainstream.

But maybe I'm being too hopeful - maybe the Mac drivers won't even support stereo vision. Time will tell...

[#9 posted by FutureNerd , October 7, 2008 9:08 PM]

Apple's own video- synthesizer- patching software development environment Quartz Composer "requires an NVIDIA GeForce2 MX, GeForce3, GeForce4 Titanium or GeForce4 MX card or any ATI AGP RADEON card." The current MacBook contains an Intel GMA X3100.